Managing the cash and liquidity of the Croatian budget

Anto Bajo, Institute of Public Finance, Zagreb, Croatia

AbstractThe principal proposition this paper will endeavour to maintain is that the liquidity of the budget is not fully managed by the Ministry of Finance, which is why it is unable, in collaboration with the Croatian National Bank, to rein in and slow down the growth in short-term public debt. Only since 2001, thanks to institutional improvements, have the conditions been created in the Ministry of Finance for cash and liquidity management. Thus payments operations, previously in the hands of a government institution, were taken over by the banks; the financial operations of budgetary spending agencies were channelled via the Single Account of the Treasury; and government deposits were gradually transferred from numerous commercial banks to the Single Account of the Treasury in the Croatian National Bank and the state-owned Croatian Postal Bank. Unfortunately, however, the Ministry of Finance, in collaboration with the Croatian National Bank, still carries out no operation of cash and liquidity management within the government Treasury system, nor does it operate on the money market with its surplus budgetary resources. Because of this state of affairs, management of the cash and liquidity of the central government budget is within the purview of the commercial banks.

Keywords: Single Account of the Treasury, payments operations, management of cash and liquidity, commercial banks